In today's world of technology, information is available more than ever before. Computers all around the world typically have several gigabytes of storage, and are connected together over networks such as the Internet. For example, the Internet contains trillions of pages of valuable information that can be accessed by end users. The most popular technique for accessing this information today is using key word searches in search engines such as google.com or yahoo.com. The problem with key word searches is that you may often get numerous, maybe even hundreds or thousands, of hits for the same term. Key word searches do not discriminate on how relevant a given term actually is within the particular content that was indexed. Rather, key word searches merely show you that a given content “contained” that word somewhere in the document.
While this key word searching approach is great for finding any document that contains that word anywhere within its text, it is not very helpful when you really only want to find the references that use a particular term as a key concept. Users are left with filtering through dozens if not hundreds of results, sometimes finding that some of the more relevant documents are very far down in the search results list. This is both time consuming and frustrating for the user seeking specific information at a particular moment.